"It's only 40 miles away so we might as well take a detour"

Further to my last post in which I kept you all enraptured with my geekiness, I thought I would explain that we do know where we are sleeping each night (and most stops are more than one night) but we tend to decide en route any activities on the day we do them or sometimes the night before. The 500+ mile stints have caused us to lose a bit of perspective on distances, though. Somewhere that we have just read about in a pamphlet or been recommended by a local is suddenly "just down the road" when it is less than 50 miles away. Sometimes it has worked out:

Chimayo

This little place in New Mexico is apparently the "Lourdes of America". Chimayo has holy dirt which you rub on places that hurt and it gets fixed.  Not sure how I feel about charging $2 for holy water or $3.50 for holy dirt but I'm sure the chapel needed a new roof or something. It was very nice little place though. Very relaxing and on holy days they do reenactments which look very good if you are into that sort of thing. So if you are in the area it's worth popping in.  G says the espresso there was terrible and the coffee shop owner tried to sell him a wood carving for $4500.

Four Corners Monument.

So there is one place in the USA where 4 states meet (for those not familiar with the US check out a map and all the straight borders between states): The Four Corners Monument:

C - "We'll pop over to Four Corners for dinner."
G - "Why are we going again?"
C- "Well we can be in four states at once, there is a thing on the ground"
G- "And this is a thing that people do, is it?"

Well it certainly was a thing. It is situated on Navajo land and is a monument on the ground.

I do think it is quite cool. But not $5 per person cool and we didn't get a dinner either (the overpriced indian fry bread trailer was closed). But we were in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado all at the same time (but although it is the recognised monument, it is apparently 2000 ft out according to official surveyors).

So sometimes the result of these 80 mile detours is that I have to be quiet for at least 10 minutes whilst G has his Grumpy McGrump Grump face on.
 
(We had Pizza and then he was happy again.)